Tag Archives: Flash-Drives

Flash drive cufflinks are nothing new. We wrote about a set back in 2006. But officially licensed and painstakingly detailed R2D2 cufflinks? No, that’s new for us. The fact that they’re official means George Lucas will get a little bit richer still on every purchase. But since George needs to get his cut, and the manufacturer his, and the distributor too, and everyone in the chain… each pair costs $200. Yeah, that’s a ridiculous amount for a pair of sleeve buttons. But hey, you never know. Well heeled Star Wars fan should take note that they’re currently sold out, though a restocking date of july 9th is given.

Corsair’s Flash Voyager GT line used to be the bee’s knees of ultra performant flash drives. Their SLC based 8GB Voyager GT from 5 years ago sat at the top of the USB 2.0 food chain for a long time. Sullied only by releasing an MLC based successor in 16GB (much slower than the 8GB) Voyager GT owned the land speed record nearly maxing out USB 2.0’s 40MB/s bus speeds. Fast forward to present day with USB 3.0 well at hand and the latest Corsair Flash Voyager GT 3.0 arrives, not with a roar but with a whimper. Boasting almost only above average read and write speeds for placing it just above the middle of the road at 135MB/s and 83MB/s respectively.

While this is certainly faster than most of the junk flash drives you will find on most shelves, Corsair is an enthusiast drive maker and has to be held to higher standards. They are currently leading the pack with their Force SSD and Revo drives, they should show flash drives some more love. Mediocre USB 3.0 speeds aside, all the other time tested features of the Corsair Voyager line remain. The durable rubber coating still seems protective enough to survive multiple trips through the dryer without a glitch. It’s still too big to share close quarters with other USB devices but it’s not supposed to be compact and cheap, it’s supposed to be big, fast and spacious for very demanding users. To get a full report on where its speed compares to other market devices as well as form and function head to Everything USB.

Mini Cooper makes one of the world’s most adored cars and is driven by some of the most fanatical drivers. The Mini Cooper flash drive from Zero Basic has immortalized some of the more classic models delivered. The long history of the little car that’s won the hearts of so many of its owners stretches back more than 50 years. The varied life and many uses of the Mini has been produced as almost a diorama of the most notable stages.

Each Mini Cooper flash drive sports 4GB of storage in a highly detailed rendition of 11 selected historic versions. With details down to tire treads and working headlights, the drives are made to cater to the hearts of Mini Cooper fans. The USB plug is also cleverly hidden away inside the trunk of the car and can be easily flipped out with a switch on the undercarriage. A sampling of the drives and a mini-history of each can be found at Everything USB.

Super Talent has been picking up the slack in an otherwise quiet flash drive market. Once upon a time, we were handed almost weekly upgrades in both size and speed. Now it is almost exclusively Super Talent that thrills those of us who still seek the fastest and biggest flash drive. And they are lapping the competition yet again by releasing the Super Talent Express RC8 flash drive. Only slightly larger than a common flash drive, the RC8 comes in capacities up to 100 GB. The increased speed and storage gives your portable drive more abilities. You can use it to synchronize libraries of files like music, videos, ISOs and VMDKs. The software options to assist in moving your files from home, school and work are quite mature now and easy to use.

Their fastest drive to date, this slim portable packs the premium desktop class SandForce controller. This controller is the source of power for almost all of the fastest desktop SSD drives. Super Talent has a flotilla of flash drives that far outpace almost every drive on the market. Each of them manages to crank more speed out of mediocre MLC NAND using multi-channel controllers (mini RAID) and buffer memory. The RC8 is an upgraded version of their RAM Cache drive which allows the USB 3.0 bus to offload large chunks of small and large files quickly letting the drive shuttle the data to the MLC compressed or slightly after the fact. This results in greatly improved transfer rates over drives without a middle tier controller helping out. Real world and comparative results have been posted in a review at Everything USB.

Anyone who has kept up with the megapixel boom in digital cameras knows the frustrating drawback of higher and higher resolution images: file size. Any recent DSLR camera is churning out images up to and over 10MB per picture and that’s ignoring video files. Filling up a 16GB memory card, which is almost the standard these days, wouldn’t take more than a few shooting sessions. Finally getting around to removing said pictures from their digital film canister could take hours. Flash memory has been bumped in speed a bit to be able to store high definition video and images but USB 2.0 card readers max out pretty quickly.

Lexar, a friend to digital photographers, has a new card reader that takes the leap to USB 3.0. Besides being fast, it has a compact and dust proof design that should make it easy to carry with your digital cameras. Newer, faster memory and this spry little reader gives you a fighting chance that you’ll be able to get all your one year old’s birthday pictures off your camera before he hits the terrible two’s. The jump from 40MB/s to 500MB/s sounds great but how does it actually fare when dealing with your average memory card. Performance, transfer rates and time are tested and graphed in a review posted at Everything USB.

If there’s one market that has to be terribly difficult for manufacturers to distinguish themselves in, I’d imagine it would be USB flash drives. But a stroll around the floor at CES this year led me to conclude that there are 3 ways you can distinguish your product. 1) Design, whether slick, durable or straight-up novelty. 2) Capacity and performance, including read and write speeds. 3) Bundled extras. And SanDisk, one of the few bona-fide brand-names when it comes to USB flash drives, has covered a couple of those criteria with their new Ultra USB Flash Drives. Originally introduced at CES, the 8GB, 16GB and 32GB drives are finally available, and we had a chance to take one for a spin. More after the jump.

At this point you know that carrying anything that looks like a concealed weapon isn’t the best of ideas, even if you’re not in an airport. But if you prefer to live dangerously while toting around 4GB of data, here’s another gun-shaped flash drive to add to your portable storage arsenal. It’s “S&W revolver shaped design” is a lawsuit-free way of saying it’s designed to look like a Smith & Wesson revolver, complete with a metal housing. And because the manufacturer doesn’t have to pay any licensing fees to S&W, they’re passing the savings on to you since this will set you back just $23 from USB Geek.

We’ve written about plenty of unofficial LEGO flash drives over the years, but the company has finally come to their senses and realized that these days a few extra gigs of novelty storage on your keychain is far more useful than an LED flashlight. At the moment they’re a little disappointing with just 2GBs of storage for ~$27, and they’ve used the most generic minifig in their catalog, but hopefully future versions will see members of their Star Wars family get converted, plus a little more storage would be nice too.

LaCie recently teamed up with French luxury brand Christofle and their new Galet USB flash drive is the result of that partnership. Hand-crafted in France from precious silver the Galet is supposed to be a luxury accessory like a fine pen or a designer watch, and as such it has a luxurious ~$150 (£94.99) price tag to match. It’s a little hard to fathom why anyone would drop that much money on just 4GB of storage that isn’t some obscenely fast SSD, but LaCie has always been known for their high-design storage solutions, and I’m sure they won’t have much trouble finding willing buyers for this one.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.